Trump is his own ‘smoking gun’

Donald Trump has committed the exact offense that forced Richard Nixon to resign

We don’t actually know if Richard Nixon ordered the break-in to the Democratic National Committee headquarters in the Watergate complex on June 17, 1972.

That, to me, is still the most remarkable feature of the Watergate crisis. A president was forced out of office for the first time in American history by a scandal centering on a single crime, and we still don’t know if he actually ordered it.

We don’t even know why it happened — if the burglars were looking for evidence that the DNC was receiving money from the North Vietnamese or Cuban governments (as conspirator Howard Hunt insisted), or information embarrassing to White House counsel John Dean (as G. Gordon Liddy, who planned the break-in with Hunt, claimed), or, as another popular theory has it, trying to find out how much DNC chair Larry O’Brien knew about Nixon’s financial dealings with billionaire tycoon Howard Hughes.

Some Republicans had stood by Nixon through his firing of the independent counsel investigating the matter, through multiple aides and Cabinet officials resigning, through the White House’s effort to resist subpoenas for documents and tapes. But when the “smoking gun” White House tape was released on August 5, 1974, Nixon’s remaining support from Republicans evaporated. Two days later, Senate Minority Leader Hugh Scott (R-PA), House Minority Leader John Jacob Rhodes (R-AZ), and former presidential candidate Sen. Barry Goldwater (R-AZ) went to the White House and informed the president that he had no support left in Congress.

They were shocked and horrified that Nixon had personally participated in the cover-up; before then there was still a sliver of a chance that the president himself wasn’t part of the conspiracy. They told Nixon that, now that his role in the cover-up was known, the votes were there to impeach him and remove him from office. The day after that, the president announced his resignation.

We don’t know how all these pieces fit together. We don’t know exactly what Donald Trump Sr.’s direct involvement is, or how aware he was of his advisers’ efforts, or the nature of his business relationship with Russia. That’s provoked a lot of very valuable investigative journalism, as well as a lot of outright conspiracy theorizing.

But focusing too granularly on the details of Trump’s personal involvement risks setting the bar too low for him. It risks suggesting that unless we find undeniable proof of collusion between Trump and the Russian government, he’s in the clear.

The fact of the matter is that without any more information than we already have, we already know Trump’s conduct is at least as outrageous as what Nixon acknowledged in the smoking gun tape.

In Nixon’s case, what crossed the line, moving top leaders from his own party to go to the White House and tell Nixon that his presidency was over, was Nixon’s attempt to hamper the FBI’s investigation into Watergate.

And we now know that before Trump fired FBI Director James Comey, he asked Comey to stop investigating former National Security Adviser Flynn. This is exactly the same kind of FBI investigation interference that forced Nixon out of the White House and shocked his Republican allies out of defending him.

As of this writing, Trump’s Republican allies in Congress are standing by him and not demanding a independent prosecutor, let alone impeachment.

But this is not a “where there’s smoke there’s fire” situation. We don’t need to know much more to know that the president has committed conduct that was once thought sufficient to warrant removal from office.

Note from Starrindissent: Although Trump’s action may warrant removal from office, as Dylan Matthews argues here, we still need to know whether Trump and/or his campaign were involved in the Russian effort to influence our presidential election. Nothing in the Nixon case is more outrageous than that–if it happened. Americans do need to know.